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From careers in banking to roles in globe-spanning agencies, social media in Africa is awash with lucrative job offers. But an investigation by AFP Fact Check found that many of these alleged ads are bogus, designed to extract cash or steal extract personal data.
Freshly out of college in Kenya – a country with more than 1.6 million unemployed youth – Job Mwangi was shortlisted for a field assistant position at the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) advertised on LinkedIn.
After passing two online tests, he was asked to pay Sh 2,000 ($20) in “facilitation fees”.
“Everything about the job posting seemed legit,” Mwangi told AFP Fact Check in a recent interview. “I was asked to pay 1,000 Kenyan shillings ($10) for medical and radiology tests… But the tests didn’t happen since I was told that they would be done at the UN offices on interview day.”
A shuttle bus meant to transfer Mwangi and more than 30 other job seekers to the UN office never showed.
“We waited for about one hour for the UN bus but it did not arrive, so we decided to take a bus on our own. On arrival at the gate, we mentioned that we had been invited for interviews with UNEP and the security officers manning the gate laughed at us telling us that we’d been scammed.”
Mwangi filed a police report but says he has heard nothing since.
